Thursday, November 25, 2010

1.) Cinelli Laser Pista is pure awesomeness and extremely rare, but of course you all know that.

2.) However, the crazy thing here is that there's an old bike shop sticker on the frame indicating that the frame was originally imported from Italy and sold by some long forgotten LBS in Kotka, Finland, of all places. Kotka is a small coastal harbor town in the southeastern Finland and certainly not known as a cycling city. Also there's never been a velodrome or anything like that there.

So who was the shop-owner Mr. Matti A. Salomaa, why did he have a Cinelli Laser Pista in his shop, who originally bought it and rode it, and how it ended up in its current location in Villeneuve le Comte in France?

Also, was this the only one he had or was there maybe more, and is there possibly another one like that hidden somewhere in here? Questions, questions...

In the description in french they pose the questions that since there is a vague number 3 inscribed in the BB shell, could the frame be the third Laser Pista ever made? Also they claim that the mentioned sticker is an address of an Finnish velodrome but that's just wrong. It's the original importer/seller LBS's sticker.

Edit 2.

Ok, turns out kid_scientific was faster than me and contacted the LBS's owner and here's what he said:

The last time the shop had been in contact with Cinelli was in the late 1980s. The frame in question is probably the one that was special ordered via the shop from Cinelli for the Estonian track cyclist Erika Salumäe, who according to Wikipedia "won the first Olympic gold medal for Estonia after the country regained its independence in 1991.

Salumäe won gold medal in track cycling in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, competing for the USSR team and in the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, competing for Estonia. From 1981 to 1989, she won 10 gold, 3 silver, and 3 bronze medals in the World Championships"

It seems very likely to me that this was the very frame she rode for the ladies gold medal in Seoul in 1988, I mean it's a damn Cinelli Laser Pista so it needs to be the fastest bike there is, right? So now you know.